YouSaid · the spoken record

Spenser Skates

lines on the record: 56
first: 2021-07-15
most recent: 2021-07-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Inexperience, entrepreneurs will be like, Oh, I don't want to share my idea with anyone, but it's like, no, no, no. Firstly, no one's going to steal your idea. No one cares. And if your ideas are, I can't remember who was it that said it, but if your ideas are any good, you're going to have to ran them down people's throats. And then, too, it's going to make it better. The amount of value you get, the world is just such a big place. It's like the kind of tip for task strategy. If you give value to it, you'll get value in return. And so that was one of the things.”
2021-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Spenser Skates - Challenging Big Ideas - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 42] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So much. One of the mistakes people would make in the competition was hey, let me create the best navigation algorithm. But that didn't really matter. Really, it was about creating one that was good enough and then having your AI adapt to whatever the right strategy was on the map. So certain maps, it was better to just go and try to win and fight the enemy and beat them in a big fight. Certain maps, it was better to try to spread out and gather resources and run away from the enemy. And so for us,”
2021-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Spenser Skates - Challenging Big Ideas - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 42] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had me, then Curtis, and then two of our other friends, and we were just unstoppable, my senior year. So it's funny because you look in that and you're like, oh, you must be a really good programmer, but I'm not. My co-founder is like twice as good as me and one of my other co-founders, Jeffrey. He's like four times as good as me. There really is a lot of parallels between that competition and starting a business is probably the closest experience you could get to that at MIT because it wasn't just about being good programmer. It was about understanding a problem, learning about it, iterating on it. It was some of the best fun I had. And that was what actually got me my first job, which was at a high frequency trading firm in a place called DRW in Chicago, and then also introduced me to the world of startups because a lot of successful former successful battle code contestants had gone on to start companies, Drew and Arash, the founders of Dropbox. There's a few others.”
2021-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Spenser Skates - Challenging Big Ideas - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 42] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wake up, we'd code for 14 hours a day and just go to sleep. And that was like three weeks straight in the competition because we had spent so much time on it compared to most of the other teams. We had developed a really, really good AI. And then I remember there's one other team that was quite good that was like vying for us with a top spot. And we happened to get lucky with some of the maps and how the thing played out one at my junior year. And then my senior year, I wanted to do it again. And this time, Curtis was like, yeah, I really should have joined you guys. The other people on my team didn't do any work last year.”
2021-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Spenser Skates - Challenging Big Ideas - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 42] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Else you do in school. And so my sophomore year, I got really into it. I was so passionate, and then I just totally sucked because it was my first time doing it. My junior year, I was just obsessed. Like I pretty much dropped everything else I was doing for the month before just to prepare for the thing, practice on the previous year's code, just learn all about it. And as it turns out, what makes you good at that is not the same thing necessarily as being a good programmer. Part of it is being a good programmer. Part of it's also learning the intricacies and the mechanics of the game thinking really deeply about what things are going to work, what strategies will work against, what opponents. We just went all out. I recruited my roommate. I tried to recruit my current co-founder, Curtis, but couldn't get him. He was actually on an opposing team that year. There was probably about 10, 15 teams who were quite serious and quite good at the competition. And part of it was we did a bunch of good things and we just spent a lot of time. We didn't do anything else.”
2021-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Spenser Skates - Challenging Big Ideas - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 42] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Done your homework. The program accommodation for those who don't know it is this competition called Battle Code, which is hosted over this kind of one month break that MIT students get in January of every year. It's a video game and the competitors create an artificial intelligence for the video game. So think of it like StarCraft for those of you who know that. You have a bunch of units. You send them around a map. You try to fight and kill the enemy. I first heard about it my sophomore year at school and I was like, holy cow, this combines like all the things I love. This combines programming. This combines video games. This combines a competition. It was this really prestigious thing at MIT. People joked about it as like the Super Bowl for nerds where a lot of the top companies would recruit there. So a lot of startups, a lot of big tech, a lot of finance, high frequency trading firms would recruit there because the work actually ends up being quite similar, more so than anything.”
2021-07-15 · Invest Like the Best · Spenser Skates - Challenging Big Ideas - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 42] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source